Every 15 Minutes Program: Logic Model Narrative
Program Mission:
The official mission statement for the National Every 15
Minutes Organization is as follows:
“It is the mission of
the National Every 15 Minutes Organization to prevent impaired driving
tragedies and to save lives by building and supporting a national network of
organizations with similar missions while preserving the integrity of the
program. To provide students with the best prevention and intervention tools
possible to deal with making mature decisions while creating meaningful family
dialogue.”[1]
To achieve this mission, the organization provides resources
for communities across the country to run the “Every 15 Minutes” Program at
their local high school.
Diagram Notes:
The attached diagram outlines the components of the program,
flowing from left to right. It starts with the inputs, then leading to the main
components of the activities, the program outputs, and finally arriving at the
program’s short term and long term outcomes. The external factors are listed in
a box at the bottom of the chart.
Program Administration:
The local community is responsible for running the Every 15
Minutes program at their high school. It is expected that participating groups
donate their time, but all associated costs are funded by grants from the
National Every 15 Minutes Organization, in addition to personal donations.
The following groups are the inputs necessary for administrating the activities:
- Police and Fire Departments
- Local Hospital
- Video Production Crew
- Community Officials
- District Attorney’s Office
- Funeral Home
- Other Community Volunteers
And the following groups are the inputs that would participate in the activities:
- High School Students
- Families of High School Students
- High School Faculty
There are a series of activities
that occur as a part of the Every 15 Minutes program. The program expands
over a two-day period.
The day before the program, the “grim reaper” notifies
random students from the student body that they will be involved in the Every
15 Minutes program. In preparation, the student participant’s parents are asked
to write an obituary for their child, summarizing the contributions their
son/daughter has made to the school/community, and submit it to the “grim
reaper”.
On day one, the “grim reaper” visits classrooms every 15
minutes, and removes one of the participants from their class. The police
officer reads that student’s obituary to the class, and the student returns to
class with “dead” outfit on (white face makeup, black “Every 15 Minutes”
t-shirt, and coroners tag), and is instructed to not speak for the rest of the
day. Simultaneously, uniformed officers leave “death notices” at the home or
workplace of the parents when their child “dies”.
After lunch, the entire school comes outside of the school
to the site of a simulated traffic accident, complete with rescue workers,
wrecked cars, and “injured” students. More students will “die” as a result of
the accident. At this point the student body continues on with the school day,
without their “dead” classmates.
Meanwhile, the “dead” participants then leave school with
the rescue workers, and experience the trip to the morgue, emergency room, and
jail; the locations where victims of drunk driving accidents end up. A video
production crew documents these visits to be used in activities the next day.
Participants are then transported to an overnight retreat, and are not allowed
to communicate with others outside of the program, to symbolize the separation
from their friends and family. Various activities could be completed at the
choice of individual programs, but most importantly the students are asked to
write a letter to their families about their experience, starting with
"Dear
Mom and Dad, every fifteen minutes someone in the United States dies from an
alcohol related traffic collision, and today I died. I never had the chance to
tell you..."
Parents of the “dead” are asked to write the same letter to
their child that night.
The next day, the entire school attends an assembly, a
“funeral” led by the “grim reaper” and a police officer, that shows the school
the experiences those students had through the footage assembled by the video
production team. The morgue and emergency room personnel make speeches, and the
“dead” students and their parents are asked to read the letters they composed
the night before. Members of the community who were personally affected by
drunk driving incidents are also encouraged to make presentations.[2]
Expected Outputs:
As the National Every 15 Minutes Organization says, “Life's
lessons are best learned through experience. Unfortunately, when the target
audience is teens and the topic is drinking and texting while driving,
experience is not the teacher of choice.”[3]
By providing a simulated experience, the Every 15 Minutes
program aims to achieve the following outputs:
- Have students consider the consequences of drinking or texting while driving
- Challenge students to think about issues of personal safety as a whole
- Help students make mature decisions when lives are involved
- Open dialogue between parents and students regarding these issues
After experiencing what would happen in the case of an
accident with an accident occurring, the program produces the opportunity for
students to work through these issues, and talk to classmates and community
members about them.
To measure if these outputs were achieved, it would be
beneficial for schools to administer a pre and post test, asking students to
rate their likeliness to participate in some of these activities, both positive
and negative. Students should be surveyed both immediately after the program,
and a couple of months later to see if the impact of the program was just
immediate or if it was maintained. In addition, students from a high school in
the same area not experiencing the Every 15 Minutes program should be surveyed
as a control.
As a whole, the National Every 15 Minutes Organization
encourages each school to administer a survey to the “dead” students after
their program, asking them to “rate the meaningfulness of different components
of the program” on a scale from 1 to 5. In 2001, these were the aggregate
results of the schools that participated[4]:
|
Event / Goal
|
Rating
|
|
Memorial
Assembly
|
4.02
|
|
Learning
about the grief process
|
3.68
|
|
Retreat
|
3.53
|
|
Understanding
my own vulnerability
|
3.46
|
|
Legal
aspects of drinking and driving
|
3.42
|
|
Hearing from
professionals
|
3.41
|
|
Collision scene/arrest
|
3.33
|
|
Obituary
|
3.00
|
|
Being pulled
out of class
|
2.44
|
Expected Outcomes:
Ideally, the Every 15 Minutes program would produce a
variety of outcomes. In the short term,
it would decrease the number of students who text while driving, and who drive
under the influence. After seeing first hand what could happen to them and
their peers, hopefully they see the danger of participating in these
activities. Similarly, after participating in the program the student should
know not to get into a car with someone who has been driving under the
influence, or who is texting while driving. Just because they are not the
driver does not mean negative consequences will not occur.
In the long term,
as a result of students making better decisions in the short term, it is
projected that fatalities and injuries from impaired driving will decline.
To measure these outcomes within a specific population, statistics
from the Department of Transportation and Highway Patrols on impaired driving crashes
from year to year can be compared to a control from a similar community. This
will show whether or not the Every 15 Minutes program has created a negative
correlation with the number of accidents.
Overall, according to the Department of Transportation,
10,839 people were killed in alcohol-impaired driving crashes, which is
approximately one-third of all traffic-related deaths in the United States[5]. This is a significant decrease to one
person dying every 48 minutes due to an impaired driver, as opposed to one
person dying every 15 minutes when the program started.
Because of the unscientific nature of this program, there
are several external factors that
could have an immeasurable impact on these results. It is difficult to
determine which of the following factors, or if the Every 15 minutes program,
has had the greatest effect:
- Other alcohol and drug resistance programs in school
- Other programs hosted in the community
- Individual parenting tactics
- Inability to perfectly replicate program at every school
- Recent drunk driving tragedy in the community
- Local police crackdown
[2] All program activity details
gathered from About Us: Every 15 Minutes,
http://www.every15minutes.com/aboutus/ (Accessed January 2012)
[3] All program goals gathered
from About Us: Every 15 Minutes, http://www.every15minutes.com/aboutus/
(Accessed January 2012)
[4] Results from Every 15 Minutes Summary Report, http://www.every15minutes.com/summary/
(Accessed January 2012)
[5] Dept of Transportation (US),
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Traffic Safety Facts
2009: Alcohol-Impaired Driving. Washington (DC): NHTSA; 2010. Available at: http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811385.PDF
No comments:
Post a Comment